A few months back, I released an app for giving children a timeout using a mobile device. I had promised an iOS version but other projects took priority. After some retooling and other fixes, the iOS version is ready and out on the store.
I’ve made a few changes along the way:
Check it out: Toddler Timeout in the App Store.
On Friday I announced the release of Finicky, a new mobile app built using Flex and AIR. I wanted to take the time today to give some link love to all of the articles I used to work out the various challenges of writing a Flex Mobile application. Hopefully this list points people to something that could help them. I’m sure I’m missing some, as I did try to grab these links as I went; I’m sure I forgot to grab one or two.
Jason’s Flex Blog
I don’t know what exactly I cribbed from Adobe’s Jason San Jose, but I know it was a lot. Pretty much every bug patch, or skinning hint that I got was from him. Just read his whole blog.
@renaun posts: Using Flash CS5 to embed Fonts in SWC to use with Flex Hero and Flex Mobile Hero
Finicky uses a lot of custom fonts. My teammate Renaun Erickson has a great post here on getting all of your fonts packaged together in a SWC file for inclusion in your apps.
URI Handlers in AIR for Android: Phone Calls, Email, Text Messages, Maps, Market, and URLs « Christian Cantrell
I wanted to launch Google Maps for getting directions to a location listed in Finicky. Adobe’s Christian Cantrell sums up how to do it pretty perfectly.
Using Menus in your Flex 4.5 Mobile Application | Devgirl’s Weblog
Fellow Adobe Evangelist Holly Schinsky has a great post about using and styling menu controls in your Android AIR apps.
Reskinning the Android contextual menu (ViewMenu and ViewMenuItems) in Flex / AIR mobile to look like Gingerbread black – daaain’s thought stream
Daniel Demmel has another helpful article that helped me get through skinning the menus.
Android, AIR and the Camera | RIAgora
A small part of the UI is grabbing pictures that you can associate with items. To do this I needed to work with the camera in AIR. Another of my Evangelist peers, Michaël Chaize, has a helpful post about doing just that.
Tips for Flex mobile apps | RIAgora
Michaël also has a great article here detailing a bunch of little hints for building mobile apps with Flex. I used at least half of them.
ArrayCollection Filter Example | Flex-Blog.com
I’ll admit it, there are pieces of basic Flex that I don’t know off the top of my head. Filtering the results of an Array Collection is one of them. So Roelof Albers’ post was very helpful .
Tombstoning in AIR-Mobile Applications « Filthy Rich Applications
One of the things you need to do with mobile applications is deal with deactivation events, or what do you do when someone calls, or the user just switches to another application. Finicky uses geolocation, so I need to be very careful about preventing wasted battery life. Adobe Technical Writer, Frank Jennings’ post has great information handling these cases.
AIR on Android OS Interactions – Send Email | EverythingFlex: Flex & AIR
Sending email from a mobile app is pretty commonplace. Doing it is well explained by this article by Rich Tretola.
AIR SQLite Optimization tricks | Parametrized SQLStatement | SQLite Transactions | zedia flash blog
Working with IO can be expensive in a mobile application. I didn’t realize how much so until I started doing some bulk inserts of sample data. So I needed some AIR optimization hints. I had forgotten completely about transactions, but luckily for me, this Dominic Gelineau post reminded me.
Toddler Timeout is now available on the Amazon Appstore store.
For those who have asked, I’m working on the iPhone version. There’s a bunch of stuff you have to do to get yourself into iTunes. I’ve finally got testing hardware, and am waiting to get access to the device to test. Then there is getting approved, which frankly, I have no idea when it will happen. But I am working on it.
tpryan.blog 